26 Facts About Ladislav Sutnar

Ladislav Sutnar was a pioneer of information design and information architecture.

Ladislav Sutnar received design commissions from a variety of employers, including McGraw-Hill, IBM, and the United Nations.

Ladislav Sutnar worked as art director for Sweet's Catalog Service for almost twenty years.

Ladislav Sutnar is best known for his books, including Controlled Visual Flow: Shape, Line and Color, Package Design: The Force of Visual Selling, and Visual Design in Action: Principles, Purposes.

Ladislav Sutnar was a master of exhibition design, typography, advertising, posters, magazine and book design.

Ladislav Sutnar was born on 9 November 1897 in Plzen, Bohemia.

Ladislav Sutnar studied painting at the School of Applied Arts in Prague, architecture at Charles University, and mathematics at the Czech Technical University.

Post graduation, Ladislav Sutnar worked on wooden toys, puppets, costumes, and stage design.

Ladislav Sutnar taught at the State School of Graphic Arts, Prague, from 1923 to 1936.

In 1927, Ladislav Sutnar became the head of publication design for a large publisher in Prague.

Ladislav Sutnar was made director of the State School of Graphic Arts beginning in 1932.

Ladislav Sutnar continued his work in exhibition design and received a gold medal at the 1929 Barcelona Exhibition.

Ladislav Sutnar was an art director of a book publisher and editor of an architectural magazine.

Ladislav Sutnar was brought to the United States to design the exhibition for Czechoslovakia at the New York World Fair in 1939.

Ladislav Sutnar implemented both typographic and iconographic characters that enabled viewers to quickly and successfully navigate through an overwhelming amount of information.

Ladislav Sutnar did this by making use of grids, tabs, icons, and symbols.

Ladislav Sutnar continued his typographic design for advertising and corporations as he was art director for Theatre Arts magazine for ten years.

Ladislav Sutnar was not credited for the implementation of parentheses around the American area code for Bell System.

Ladislav Sutnar himself said that the absence of these organizational methods and simplified legibility makes everyday activities much more difficult to accomplish.

Ladislav Sutnar was one of the first designers to actively practice in the field of information design.

Ladislav Sutnar's work was based on rationality and the process of displaying massive amounts of information in a concise and organized way to benefit the general viewer.

Ladislav Sutnar often used punctuation symbols to help organize information, but his signature creation was the idea to place parentheses around the area codes in telephone books.

Ladislav Sutnar was heavily influenced by the ideas of Modernism and his work was well structured.

Borrowing from the principles of De Stijl, Ladislav Sutnar's work had a reduction to primary colors, straight lines, and an overall harmony of irregular text alignment.

Ladislav Sutnar's work is simple but suggests motion with vivid colors and directional patterns.

Ladislav Sutnar organized two New York gallery exhibitions of his nudes, In Pursuit of Venus and Venus: Joy-Art.